Do we have the "live" figures for Casualty and Pointless?

Live audience figures don't matter as much to the BBC as they do to commercial channels.
Commercial channels want to be able to tell their advertisers that their money is well spent because people are actually watching their ads.
Nowadays that only really happens with live viewing, on recorded viewings people tend to skip through them.
Therefore live viewing figures would be considered very important for the X Factor say, but not so much for Doctor Who. It's much more important than live numbers to the BBC that many people do actually watch their programmes, regardless of when they do it, and actually like their programmes, which is monitored by the AI figures.

Yes, this was for the week of Kill the Moon:

BBC One
17:30 - Pointless Celebrities: 3.90m
18:25 - Strictly: 7.38m
20:30 - Doctor Who: 3.67m
21:15 - Casualty: 4.17m

ITV (not including +1 as these are all 'live' numbers)
20:00 - The X Factor: 5.37m
21:20 - Through Keyhole: 3.22m

Doctor Who getting a smaller live audience at 8:30pm than Pointless did at 5:30pm, isn't great news.

I take your point, but live numbers are still important when it comes to recruiting new viewers. How is a show ever going to grow its audience, if it's not picking up casual interest? You don't get new viewers from iPlayer or recordings. You don't get the next generation of kids watching by putting it on at 8:30pm and getting low live numbers. There's no problem with the consolidated figures at the moment, but the warning signs are there that this could become a problem in the future.

As I just said, this would be a much bigger worry if Doctor Who was on a commercial channel, not so much on a BBC channel for the reasons I stated.
You get new viewers mainly by word of mouth, and always have done.
People will still tell others if they enjoyed watching something and recommend it to them wherever and whenever they saw it.
The big difference between now and the "old days" is that those potential new viewers can probably now still go and see the programme as it will be still available somewhere, whereas years ago they would have missed it!

Agreed - the BBC is quite right to offer an alternative, even if it does not rate highly "on the night".

There is far too much emphasis now on overnights, especially when it comes to some on the main Ratings thread. These days, overnights are but a part of the total ratings picture

What do you think Pointless would get against the competition at 8:30pm?

Move Doctor Who away from X Factor, yes. Off Saturday nights? No thank you.

I'm not suggesting it's a massive problem per se, but if Doctor Who gets the same number of live viewers at 6pm as it does at 8:30pm, what's the point of it having the plum slot after Strictly? It would be better off going in the early slot, where it would do just as well, and the 8:30pm slot would be better going to something that can keep the large audience that it would inherit from Strictly. As it is, people are switching off (or over) when Strictly ends, and even though others are watching on catchup, Doctor Who simply isn't doing well enough in terms of live viewers to deserve that timeslot. It would be better off at 6pm when the kids can watch live, and there is more time left in the evening to get a healthy VOSDAL figure.

I don't think it move from Saturdays, but I don't think the 8:30pm slot has done it any favours.

But are also 4.5 million or so in a number of cases. 3.5 million is hardly the norm.


What use is a large "inherited~" audience if a large part of that audience are unlikely to be DW viewers? Or if a part of that audience have just sat through 2 hrs of TV and want/need a break?

Though I do have to say that I'm amused that we have gone from Overnights to Consolidated, all the way back to Live.

Don't go backwards. Nobody will be happy.

And what did DW get live the past couple of weeks? It certainly was not 3.5 million. It was just over 5 million and 4.5 million.

That's not true. The live figures for this series have been as follows:

Ep 1: 5.15m
Ep 2: 3.76m
Ep 3: 3.65m
Ep 4: 3.67m
Ep 5: 3.58m
Ep 6: 3.80m
Ep 7: 3.67m

We don't have figures beyond that yet. So, okay, the live figures are slightly above 3.5m, but with the exception of the first episode, none of them have been anywhere near 4.5m.


Well, that's my point! The show that follows Strictly needs to be something which viewers are less likely to switch off. So it needs to be something which shares more of a demographic than Strictly does with Doctor Who. From the figures above, Doctor Who did better in week 2 at 7:30pm, following Tumble, than it did in week 7, at 8:30pm, following Strictly. Isn't that a bit of a surprise, really? It's not a problem to ask these sorts of questions. But it could be a problem not to address them and just say 'the consolidated figures are fine, so the scheduling doesn't matter.'

No, it didn't. Those were the overnights, including VOSDAL, not the live numbers. The live number for Flatline was likely to have been the lowest yet.

OK, so no episode at or close to 3.5 million then - most are close to 3.6 to 3.8 million. But the last two have been significantly higher than that figure of 3.5 million.


Why though? And I ask that as an honest question.

People need a choice, especially those who have no interest in the preceding programme. That's a balanced schedule for the viewer if not for the ratings aficionado.

,And of course, people need a rest. Some will not be able or willing to sit through nearly three hrs of TV without some sort of break.

Sorry - my mistake then. But I thought that the overnights as quoted included VOSDAL (i.e up to 2am I think)?

No, they haven't! You're talking about the overnights, which include recordings watched before 2am, not the live numbers! Although we don't have the live number revealed for Flatline yet, given the overnight of 4.6m (lower than every other episode so far), the live number was probably around 3.4m.


Of course. But my point is, if the programmes are going to be scheduled in any sort of sensible order, you have to ask what is best for each show? Otherwise, why not just show Doctor Who at 3am and say 'people will timeshift it'? Doctor Who is being shown a little bit too late in the evening – that's all I'm saying. It looks like it will do a bit better if shown at 6:30pm, and a more suitable show is shown in the post-Strictly slot.

That's correct, yes!
It is likely that if shown at 6:30/7ish, Doctor Who would not only get the same live audience (possibly slightly more), but with 7 hours left for VOSDAL, the overnights might look a bit better too. Plus the kids would find it easier to watch, and we'd be more likely to get younger kids trying the show for the first time.

Like I say, none of this is a huge problem... yet. But it could become one, if they don't look at all the evidence.

Well I've learn't something today. I thought live figures and overnights were the same I would suggest that the Saturday night schedules are primarily dictated by what suits Strictly and X-Factor best and everything else has to fit around it as best it can. I'd put Strictly on later too but it can't really go up against X-Factor because Simon Cowell starts moaning about splitting the audience, blah blah blah. Also those are the two shows that both channels will care most about live figures because they will want to maximise the revenue's from people phoning in.

That's a really interesting point, morph1970. It would be interesting to see how episodes shown earlier have faired in terms of VOSDAL - with the extra few hours.

A couple of points ......

Firstly, Strictly cannot go much later during the early weeks as it would finish far too late 9remember that the results have to be recorded some 20 mins + aggregation/checking time after the main show ends, and the audience has to exit the studio, pick up their belongings and exit the Elstree complex in order to catch buses, trains etc. Not forgetting the riggers, technicians etc who need to dismantle the studio sets/lighting rigs/sound & vision etc and pack everything away (including cables, scaffolding etc) in order to free up the studio.

Secondly, the BBC does not make any money at all from the phone votes, the call costs simply cover the costs of setting up & administering the phone voting.

Indeed. In fact, we already can see to an extent, if we compare Episode 3 (Robot of Sherwood), which was shown at 7:30pm and Episode 6 (The Caretaker), shown at 8:30pm.

Episode 3 LIVE: 3.65m
Episode 6 LIVE: 3.80m

Not much difference really, but Episode 6 benefited slightly from following Strictly, in this instance. But look what happens when we add the VOSDAL figures, to take us up to the reported overnights that we see on a Sunday morning:

Episode 3 VOSDAL: 1.57m (giving us an overnight rating of 5.22m)
Episode 6 VOSDAL: 1.09m (giving us an overnight rating of 4.89m)

So, surely part of the reason for there being fewer VOSDAL viewers for The Caretaker is because there was less of the evening left for viewers to watch the episode before the cut-off time!

But then again, one reason why VOSDAL is relatively high is that, if people want to watch both DW and a live programme, they will watch the live programme live, and the recorded programme later. It also underlines my theory that people are less likely to want to sit through nearly three hours of TV comprising two programmes with few opportunities for breaks. So they watch one live and the other one on catchup, possibly after a break that night, possibly the next day.

I believe Strictly does dictate when they can show it at the moment but I do think it's a shame it's on late now as the children miss out. On the other hand, with all the character stuff and seemingly callous Doctor stuff, maybe they are moving away from pleasing the kids anyway?

Oddly enough, BBC America saw a similar bump and dip for Mummy & Flatline